[Claude Moraes is a Labour MEP for London, deputy leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party and Chair of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee.]
Claude,
No matter whether you know it, you are speaking for the Constitutional rights of 318 million Americans, and your voice is desperately needed.
It’s bad enough if the debate about mass surveillance is less than satisfactory in the European countries but it’s even more disturbing when many Americans are still uninformed, indifferent, and inert on the issue. As you say, attention has been diverted away from the substance of Ed Snowden’s disclosures to his persona and this is especially so in the US. Even the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, speculated on national television about orders from Moscow that would explain Snowden’s actions while admitting she had no proof of them.
For many Democratic loyalists in the US, the details of mass surveillance aren’t as important as the politics because the revelations of NSA practices came during a Democratic administration. This is the constituency that usually stands for civil liberties but now many remain silent for fear of disillusioning Democratic voters. Elections are a matter of turnout and if Democrats disenfranchise themselves by staying home, the Republicans win. In the US, the two-party system doesn’t accommodate critics on the far left either who are sometimes unfairly blamed for acting as spoilers in elections.
I am still optimistic. Your work set something in motion which others will augment and continue. For that, you, and your colleagues, Sophie in ‘t Veld and Jan Albrecht are my super heroes. Congratulations and best wishes in your new lofty position as Chair of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee and thank you for all of your valuable efforts to preserve freedom.
I’m quoting your article “Mass surveillance post-Snowden: an unbalanced debate” with a link to the original piece at Open Democracy. The last paragraph is a good guide for future debates here.
"The debate on privacy and security needs to focus on the purpose and scale of surveillance and its place in a democratic society. What are the acceptable measures to fight crime and terrorism? Where does a line need to be drawn to protect the right to private life and protection of personal data in a digitalised world? This is not to say that all spying and surveillance operations are unacceptable - we understand the importance of these tools in the fight against terrorism. But we need to decide if this type of indiscriminate, untargeted mass surveillance, which includes every shape or form of data from people's day to day lives, is acceptable, and we need to allow people to have that discussion and make the decision for themselves. People are entitled to privacy on the Internet just as they have a right to privacy in all other areas of their lives."
This excerpt is from an article by Claude Moraes published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/...
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